Seminar: every kid is an artist

Today, Saturday, we carried out a seminar about creativity. We sended the invitations a few days before and we developed it with a few young volunteers from different local assosiations and people from our hosting-organization. It was in the Direction building during the Saturday morning. The aim of the seminar was to explain what means creativity, how it can be stimulated, and specially how to stimulate the creativity with kids. This idea became through our activities with the children. We used a lot of different activities to stimulate the creativity of our kids through arts, sports and games. We use so many different inspirations to create, re-create, modify or directly obtain the activities we do. And all these activities belong to an educational process for the kids. We wanted to explain our own methods to stimulate the creativity with the kids and let clear that the kids are already artists without complex, prejudices, lack of risk or rigidity, important barriers for the creativity. 

We started talking about what is creativity, how it works and which are its important elements. We gave 3 exercises to stimulate our creativity, and we used each one to talk about one element of creativity:

Then we started to talk about which elements are important to stimulate the creativity with kids. As you know, creativity is a natural skill of every human, and its specially free and developed in the childhood. Elements to don't stop it and to stimulate it:
   - create an inspiring atmosphere
   - respect the time to play
   - value the imagination
   - let them to be curious
   - respect their natural creativity

To practise a little bit about all these elements we made an exercise. We split in 4 groups. Each group has different materials to paint a Winnie the Poo:
-Group 1: A picture of the Winnie the Poo's outline + red, yellow, green and orange colors
-Group 2: A picture of the Winnie the Poo's outline with introctions about which parts are in which color + red, yellow, green and orange colors 
-Group 3: A picture of Winnie the Poo + a lot of colors
-Group 4: A picture of Winnie the Poo + a lot of colors, glitter, crepe paper, glue, playdoh...

We could see the difference of materials in the groups in the different results of the groups. The more creative group was the group with more materials, space and time. We open a space to talk about the results and the group with more materials explained that they feel the need to use every material, being so creative and go out of the rules. For example they did Winnie a girl, a superhero or a mix of all the memories of the childhood. 

  
After a break and a few energizers we talked about use arts, sports and games to stimulate the creativity of the kids. 
Finally we talked about the myths around creativity and we gave a few examples of our experiences.

It was a good exchange of ideas and it was so good to see the young Slobozia volunteers again! Thank you for come to our seminar!!!

Al :)